


Midas' Touch

by bendingwind



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-14
Updated: 2012-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-05 09:36:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Request from tsukinobun. Bruce/Tony, 5 times fic.</p>
<p>Five Times Bruce and Tony were really awesome bros, and one time they weren't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midas' Touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tsukinobun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukinobun/gifts).



**[1]** July 2012

Bruce hasn’t had a significant other of any gender in years. It’s kinda pathetic when he stops to think about it, but between the Other Guy and running for his life, he thinks he’s got a pretty good excuse. It becomes a lot harder to use that excuse once he joins the Avengers and is gleefully settled into a spare room in Stark Tower by Tony Stark himself. The first Friday evening he spends in the tower his peaceful sprawl in front of the television is interrupted by a flat-out drunk Tony and a tipsy Pepper stumbling in the door at one in the morning, giggling and making out rather loudly. He flees before he can be any more scarred for life.

After that, he takes to spending his weekend evenings in his lab two floors down, very pointedly _not_ thinking about Betty or his own pathetic lack of a love life. He actually manages to pass a couple of months in this relatively peaceful compromise before he makes the mistake of sneaking a cot down there, in order to completely eliminate the risk of Awkward Encounters. It’s not like he didn’t know what he was getting into when he moved in with a couple who are practically married, after all.

“So, uh,” Tony says, leaning against the table. He doesn’t startle Bruce, even though it’s a Friday night and he’d fully expected to be alone, but only because Bruce is becoming alarmingly adept at anticipating appearances of Tony-as-a-lab-ninja. It probably says bad things about just how often Tony pulls that trick. It takes him a moment to realize, as he consciously slows his heart rate, that Tony is still speaking. “--we didn’t really think, sorry, I’m bad at realizing. What do you think?”

“Er,” Bruce says, hesitantly, “Yes?”

“Great!” Tony claps him loudly on the back, beams at him, and ninjas his way back out of the lab. Bruce is left with a vague feeling that he has missed something entirely (which, fair enough), so he decides to focus on checking a Laplace Transform in his equation and forget the conversation entirely.

The next day he goes out for groceries and comes back to find that the cot in his lab is gone, he now has a private entrance to the small suite that Tony gave him, and that someone has left a very nice tux on his bed. There’s a note scrawled in Tony’s horrifying handwriting lying on top of it, informing him that he’s got a date and he had better not be late.

The date ends pretty badly when the very nice woman Pepper recommended realizes that by ‘one of the Avengers’, Tony meant ‘the one who turns into a giant green rage monster’, but Bruce appreciates the thought. And honestly, there’s something kind of charming about having his very first Really Bad Date in the last several years.

He leaves a note pinned to the door of Tony’s lab thanking him. Tony will probably notice it the next time Pepper makes him come out for light and air.

**[2]** September 2012

Bruce would like to say that it’s all Tony’s fault. God knows Tony goads him enough; it’s sort of a miracle it hasn’t happened before. But no, this was entirely him.

The third-from-the-top floor of Stark Tower is in ruins. He’s probably just lucky he only took out a non-load bearing wall and a chunk of floor, but that doesn’t really ease the guilt any. He finds himself standing in the living area looking as sheepishly apologetic as he can.

“Sorry, I’ll, uh, pay for the damages.”

“Whatever,” Tony waves his hand at him from where he’s bent over the schematics, “Actually I was thinking about removing that floor anyway, maybe put in a cool loft apartment for you. Don’t worry about it.”

Bruce knows for a fact that he was considering no such thing, because they’d only just discussed Bruce’s satisfaction with his living quarters the day before, when Tony had offered him an entire floor instead of his collection of rooms in the main living area.

Bruce, who is used to blame, condemnation and outright hatred for the shit the Other Guy pulls frankly has no idea what to do with the fact that Tony _just doesn’t care._

“Hey, how do you feel about a waterslide that shoots you into your lab?” Tony asks, and Bruce can only gape.

“No,” Pepper says, striding in from the kitchen. “No waterslides, we’ve already discussed this, and it violates about six building code regulations.”

“A regular slide?” Tony asks, hopefully.

Bruce clears his throat. “That’s maybe not such a good idea,” he points out, meekly. Tony’s mouth opens in a little ‘o’ of understanding, and then he laughs out loud.

“Fine, spiral staircase it is. I always wanted a spiral staircase, I can make it so that it sort of automatically rotates down, you won’t even have to walk... I was thinking two floors, your own kitchen and living area on the lower floor...” Tony rambles on about building plans, and it should feel like he’s trying to slowly cut Bruce out of his and Pepper’s lives (which would be totally understandable) but somehow Bruce knows that Tony’s really just trying to give him back a life of his own.

It’s a strangely touching thought.

“I’d kind of like the stairs not to move,” he interjects. “I could do with the sense of normality.”

Tony just blinks at him, and then breaks into a wide grin.

“Fine, ruin all my fun. Normal staircase it is! Hey, what about a sunken bathtub--”

“Tony, you are not going to build a pool in his bathroom and try to pass it off as a bathtub to get around building codes.”

For the first time since the accident, Bruce feels like he belongs somewhere.

**[3]** November 2012

It’s quiet when Bruce comes back after a month in India, but not in the way it usually is during the day, when Tony’s hiding out in his lab and Pepper is off CEO’ing like the marvel she is. He wanders through his weird little in-suite penthouse and into the larger part of the living quarters of Stark Tower. To his surprise, Tony is there, even though it’s the middle of the day. He’s curled up on the couch, and there’s crap reality television on, but he doesn’t think Tony’s watching. There’s a thick bandage wound around one of his arms.

He wants to turn around and walk away and leave Tony to whatever it is. It’s not really any of his business.

But... he’s been living here for more than half a year. He’s a little rusty on friends and friendship, and he’ll be the first to admit it, and maybe that alone makes it his business.

“Pepper’s gone,” Tony said, before Bruce could decide whether to retreat or approach. 

“Oh, uh,” Bruce says, because he isn’t entirely sure what that means and also because clearly Pepper isn’t around. It’s the middle of the day, and she has a company to run.

As far as he knows Tony has not yet built a mind-reading device, but his train of thought must be fairly obvious, because Tony almost immediately continues, “She’s gone. Came home with a bullet hole in my arm after that last run-in with some villain set on ending the world, and she just... lost it. Said she couldn’t handle this, this lifestyle, constantly breaking everything and rebuilding it, never knowing when she was going to lose me... she said I had to give up the suit, the team, or I had to give her up. She.. she apologized, God, she _apologized_ for forcing me to make that decision, said she knew it wasn’t fair, _of course it wasn’t fair--”_

Tony takes a deep breath... and then he starts to cry.

Bruce panics, because _what the fuck._

“Uh... should I get some ice cream?” he blurts out, because his brain-to-mouth disconnect gets really, really bad when he’s freaked out. He supposed it could be worse; the Other Guy is probably the last thing Stark needs right now. Knowing him, he’d probably smash Tony for having puny feelings or Pepper for causing them, and then where would they all be.

Tony giggles, a little hysterically, and Bruce makes for the convenience store across the street.

They don’t eat the ice cream. It melts and eventually gets poured down the sink, because it turns out they actually both kind of hate cold deserts, and Bruce sits there and lets Tony ramble about his father and how much he hates himself and how he destroys everything he ever touches and how miserable his entire fucking life is. As evening passes into night passes into early morning passes into mid-morning of the next day, and Tony’s silences gradually become longer, Bruce lays a hand on Tony’s arm, just below the bandage, and says, “I, uh, know a little something about destroying everything I touch. I just wanted to say... uh, well, thank you. For helping me to repair the things I’ve broken over the years. What I mean is, you’re not a lost cause or, uh, anything.”

He doesn’t just mean ‘thank you for not being pissed when I break your house.’ From the way the ghost of a smile flits across Tony’s face, he thinks Tony understands. They both fall asleep there, sprawled across Tony’s comfortable, stylish couches, and nobody comes to bother them about meetings or experiments or impending apocalypses.

Later, they watch films with as much action and as little plot as they can find, and make increasingly sarcastic quips at each other about how this is the worst excuse for a girl’s night in that has ever existed.

Bruce knows from experience that distraction is the best way to heal some kinds of wounds.

**[4]** May 2013

The thing about SHIELD is that they don’t forget you and they never stop feeling like you _owe_ them something. Clint and Natasha, fair enough; they’d both be on death row a dozen times over without SHIELD’s interferences.

Bruce still winces when he realizes that the same is true in his case.

So that’s how he ends up more or less marooned several thousand feet in the air aboard the Helicarrier, reverse-engineering a virus that R&D apparently can’t make heads nor tails of. Bruce doesn’t bother to point out that it’s not really his area of expertise. He’s been here for two weeks, despite a number of requests to at least stop by his lab at Stark Tower to check on some experiments he’d been running. Apparently they’re a little concerned that he’s going to try and run. Mostly he’s just sick of sleeping on the deeply uncomfortable cot they’ve set up in his new lab aboard the Helicarrier, which much like the cage they’d stuck Loki in, can be dropped at a moment’s notice.

Better safe than sorry, and all that. It doesn’t make him like it any more than he did before.

He finally figures out the virus (which is actually closely related to a virus that attacks fungi and can sometimes cause problems in third world jungle populations when an individual becomes infected with fungi that carry the virus). SHIELD still keeps him aboard the Helicarrier, locked in his lab-cage, despite numerous requests to leave.

After three days of this, Cap comes by to visit. He apologizes and says he doesn’t see that there’s much he can do about it, but Tony shows up less than an hour after Cap leaves, fully kitted out as Iron Man.

“C’mon, babe, we’re busting this joint,” he informs Bruce cheerfully, once he’s overridden the systems and broken his way through bulletproof glass into Bruce’s lab. Bruce raises an eyebrow.

“What took you so long?” he asks, and Tony favors him with his most shit-eating grin.

“Oh, you know, the usual; kittens to pull out of trees, damsels in distress, the triplets from the September spread of Firefighters in Thongs...”

Bruce rolls his eyes and laughs.

“Thanks for the thought, but I don’t think Fury’s going to let me leave just because you say so. Cap certainly didn’t think he’d listen to him.”

“Psh,” Tony makes a dismissive motion with his hand, “we aren’t asking. Come on, grab hold, you ever been flying before?”

“Yes,” Bruce hisses, but before he can try to explain just why this is a _very bad idea_ \--a frigid metal arm wraps around him and he is _flying._ It’s magnificent and incredible and somehow he’s terrified and yet he _still_ feels the furthest from the other guy that he’s ever felt before.

Tony builds him his very own jetpack as a welcome back gift. Bruce doesn’t know what to say.

**[5]** June 2013

Bioengineering is absolutely not Tony’s field of expertise, but Bruce doesn’t even bat an eyelash over the fact that in trying to create a bio-organic version the suit, Tony has given himself probably the worst cold in the history of the planet. Instead he sighs and pulls out the kit he carried around the world with him, doses Tony with some incredible remedies he’d picked up over the years, and rotates the cool clothes on his forehead and feet in an attempt to keep his temperature down. Tony stares up at him from his position lying on the couch with pathetically grateful eyes, and thanks him through a badly stuffed up nose. It’s absurdly endearing.

“I could hire a nurse, you know,” Tony sniffles on the second day.

“Yeah, and you’d fire her in less than five minutes,” Bruce replies with an eyeroll, pushing soup at Tony. Tony grimaces and complains, loudly, that at least a nurse wouldn’t force him to eat extremely disgusting rural cures from the middle of fuck-all nowhere, but he slurps the entire bowl down.

(Bruce can tell by the way his eyes are lit up that he actually really likes it.)

“I’ll have you know that I once kept a nurse on staff for six hours,” Tony informs him, as regally as he can manage without the ability to breathe through his nose.

“I’m sure you did,” Bruce says, patting him on the shoulder and swapping out the cloth on his forehead for another, cooler, one.

Tony informs him that his recovery is unusually quick, and Bruce points that that’s probably because he didn’t spend the entire time trying to pretend he was absolutely fine while making the situation drastically worse.

They spend a lot of time sitting around watching crap television and arguing about whether or not it is socially acceptable for mothers to throw their daughters into creepy beauty pageants. Bruce falls firmly on the side of _morally reprehensible;_ Tony insists that at least they care about their daughters, but that may just be because he thinks cat fights between seven-year-old girls are hilarious.

Tony insists that he takes _great_ care of himself, and it must have been those gross cures from fuck-all nowhere that fixed him up so quick.

Bruce maybe hacks Tony’s system for the first time since he’s lived here to change JARVIS’ protocol so that it will inform him the next time Tony’s dumb enough to meddle in things he doesn’t have a degree in.

**[+1]** July 2013

Tony announces loudly and frequently that he is now prepared to jump back into the dating pool for a couple of weeks before he actually gets around to arranging an actual date. Bruce goes back to leaving the door between his suite and the rest of the living quarters shut, and using his own private entrance. Let it never be said he is anything but an awesome, non-cockblocking best friend. 

He still notices when Tony comes back from the first date with no willing woman hanging off his arm or latched to his lips, and then when he comes back from a second and then a third date in the same way. He starts to wonder if maybe Tony’s not as mentally stable as he thought, which worries him, so he takes to spending an hour or so every afternoon trying to subtly interrogate Tony while he works on the armor.

Tony mostly mumbles incomprehensible things about turning over a new leaf and trying to move on from his failure of a love life, and Bruce knew he wasn’t completely over Pepper, but...

After the fifth such date, he calls Betty. It’s probably weird and a little creepy to hook up your ex-girlfriend and your best friend, but he figures they should have a lot in common, and maybe it’ll work out for the best. She’s in town for the weekend to attend a conference, anyway.

Tony brings Betty home, and Bruce realizes through the surging rush of jealousy that he’s not upset Tony is with Betty--he’s upset that Betty is with _Tony._

Oh. Well.

Betty calls him before her flight out of town the next morning to gripe a little about his pathetic matchmaking attempts and inform him that the only reason she wasn’t more upset was that Tony had been an absolute gentleman, and even offered her a guest room in the tower so that she wouldn’t have to cough up for a hotel room in downtown New York.

He sighs and lets relief seep through him, and makes his way into the large shared kitchen to see about bringing Tony some breakfast. He never eats unless someone makes him, because cooking is apparently a waste of time.

Tony’s in his lab, as usual, tinkering with something complex and definitely biological in origin. Apparently he’s noticed Bruce’s warning program and taken it out of JARVIS’ software.

Tony looks up at him with tired eyes as the door to the lab slides shut behind him, and nods for Bruce to set the slightly-burned omelette on the table. The moment the plate touches the table with a quiet click, Tony starts rambling.

“So I’m going to say something and feel free to shut me up at any time, by the way, especially if I look like I’m irrevocably ruining our friendship or whatever, because that’s a thing I do, I don’t know if anyone told you, anyway, Betty sort of kind of thinks you have feelings for me, like the romantic, schmubby kind involving the L-word and other scary things, and this is the part where you should maybe tell me to shut up but you’re not doing that so I’m going to keep going, and so I wanted to let you know that I maybe have those feelings too in case you, you know, wanted to do anything about it.”

Bruce stares at him for a full ten seconds before he manages to detangle the mess of words Tony has just thrown at him.

“Uh,” he says.

“Right, that’s a good answer, yeah, let’s just forget this ever happened and thanks for the food, by the way, I don’t think I remembered to eat anytime last night, you can go now, I’m sure you have--”

There are a lot of reasons Bruce should not be in a relationship.

He leans down and kisses Tony anyway.


End file.
